Digital cameras have recently become popular with both home and business users, as they have come down in price, and as users have gained experience with them. A digital camera generally varies from a regular camera in that instead of taking pictures on film that must be developed, it takes pictures that are saved as image files within the camera. The image files may be saved on internal memory of the digital camera, or on a removable memory card or other computer-readable media that can be removed from the camera and inserted into a corresponding slot of a computer or a device attached to the computer. The image files are thus usually uploaded to a computer, where the user may manipulate them, and ultimately may print them on a printer.
Digital cameras generally have some advantages over regular film cameras. One advantage is that the user may have the opportunity to preview the pictures taken on a small screen of the screen. If a picture is not desired, the user can then easily delete the picture, freeing up the memory for taking additional pictures, if the camera uses erasable memory to store the image files. Furthermore, memory cards or other computer-readable media usually allow for a larger number of pictures to be taken than a typical roll of film does. This enables the user to take a large number of pictures, which can later be culled down to a more reasonable number for printing or exchanging with others, such as via email or a computer disk or other media.
However, the large number of pictures that can be taken by a digital camera presents its own set of problems. In some cases, uploading the pictures from the digital camera to a computer may be a slow process, and may require a large portion of the computer's storage. Once the pictures are uploaded to the computer, the user also loses the concept of a “roll” of film in which pictures are logically grouped according to the event or time period in which the pictures were taken. Furthermore, printing the pictures can be a slow process that may take hours if there are a large number of pictures to print, especially if the user is using a consumer-oriented color inkjet printer. Where the user wishes to exchange pictures with others, emailing or otherwise transferring the pictures electronically can also be a slow process that requires individual attachment of each picture to send, and exceedingly slow where the user only has a telephone modem network connection and not a broadband network connection. In addition, many mail servers exclude large files, which digital image files often are.
Deciding which pictures to upload, print, or exchange may therefore be desirable to the user before starting one of these processes. The user may examine the pictures one by one on the small screen of the camera to decide which pictures to actually upload to the computer. However, this can be disadvantageous, because the small screen is an inconvenient display device on which to view pictures, and is a relatively low image-quality device on which to view pictures. The user may also examine the pictures one by one on the screen of the computer after uploading them, to determine which pictures to print or exchange. This may entail a time consuming and laborious process of opening each picture individually in a photo-viewing computer program. In the case of printing, the color fidelity of the screen of the computer may be different or worse than that of the printer. In the case of exchanging pictures, the user may not know which pictures the person to whom he or she is sending the pictures actually wants.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for the present invention.